The anxious, melancholic drama “Two Lives” is the story of a woman caught up in the toxic backwash of long-ago events that exert a fearful grip on the present. Unholy forces shaped the double life of this woman, Katrine (Juliane Köhler, “Nowhere in Africa”). Happily married and living in Norway, she has a secret past that merges two of the darker chapters of 20th-century European history.

Beginning in the mid-1930s, the Nazi Lebensborn program to breed an Aryan “master race” produced thousands of children, many of them procreated by members of the German SS in casual encounters with blond, blue-eyed women deemed racially pure. Because Norwegians, with their Viking ancestors, were thought to be an especially hardy breed, they were considered ideal specimens. Once these women gave birth in occupied Norway, their children were often taken from them and reared in special orphanages in Germany. After World War II, the taint of Nazism caused the mothers and the Lebensborn children remaining in Norway to face harsh discrimination.

Starting in the 1960s, the Stasi, the East German secret police, recruited many of the grown-up progeny in East Germany as spies, sending them to Norway to be reunited with unsuspecting families. In some cases, the Stasi appropriated the identities of Lebensborn children and conferred them on East Germans trained in espionage before placing them with Norwegian families. Since many documents related to the program were destroyed, few records existed to attest to their identities as Lebensborn children.

“Two Lives” is set in 1990, just after the fall of Communism. And although it has the somber tone and trappings of a spy movie, it is more a story of identity theft and its consequences than a cloak-and-dagger melodrama in the John le Carré mode. Loosely based on a novel by Hannelore Hippe and directed by Georg Maas, it unwraps the biography of this so-called Katrine, who after supposedly escaping East Germany by boat, was united with her supposed mother, Ase (Liv Ullmann), in Norway. Now Katrine is married to Bjarte (Sven Nordin), a Norwegian submarine captain with whom she is passionately in love; they live with their daughter (Julia Bache-Wiig), her baby and Ase, a dignified, taciturn woman with haunted eyes. We are tipped off that Katrine may be concealing her real identity: in an early scene, she visits East Germany in disguise and calls herself Vera.

Back home, Katrine is visited by Sven Solbach (Ken Duken), a lawyer who pressures her to testify in a lawsuit seeking reparations from the Norwegian government for the shunned Lebensborn offspring. She reluctantly agrees, but the dogged lawyer finds glaring omissions in her story. Katrine claims not to remember crucial details.

At the same time she is threatened by her thuggish Stasi handlers, who insist that she not divulge her true identity. Squeezed from two sides, she finds her contented family life gravely imperiled. Ase, meanwhile, takes in events with a wary, stoical silence.

“Two Lives” doesn’t fill in enough of the blanks. We never learn what, if any, espionage operations Katrine participated in. But in a flashback, we meet the real Katrine, who found her way home while Ase was away and was greeted by her doppelgänger. In grainy color-saturated scenes, we also witness the real Katrine’s flight from East Germany.

“Two Lives” is an absorbing, well-acted, moderately suspenseful mystery, although its time line of events is fuzzy to the point of impenetrability. If she were played a different way, Katrine would be an unsympathetic, diabolical monster. But the film portrays her as a victim of history who is increasingly desperate at the prospect of losing a family to which she feels she belongs.

Two Lives

Directors

Georg Maas, Judith Kaufmann

Writers

Georg Maas, Christoph Tölle, Ståle Stein Berg, Judith Kaufmann

Stars

Juliane Köhler, Liv Ullmann, Sven Nordin, Ken Duken, Julia Bache-Wiig

Running Time

1h 37m

Genres

Drama, Thriller

Movie data powered by IMDb.com

Two Lives

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by Georg Maas; written by Mr. Maas, Christoph Tolle, Stale Stein Berg and Judith Kaufmann; director of photography, Ms. Kaufmann; edited by Hansjorg Weissbrich; music by Christoph M. Kaiser and Julian Maas; art design by Bader El Hindi; costumes by Ute Paffendorf; produced by Zinnober Film, Dieter Zeppenfeld; Helgeland Film, Axel Helgeland; B&T Film, Rudi Teichmann; released by Sundance Selects. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. In Norwegian and German, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. This film is not rated.